Driving In My Sleep

I've been driving in my dreams again.* I actually own a car in my dreams. It's a vintage tomato colored convertible of uncertain make. It shows up periodically. Usually I'll be desperately in need of a way to get to some of those classes I'm always taking and missing and I suddenly remember that I have this car.

Last night I didn't have that car. I was in a giant house having a birthday party to which most of the cast of friends were talking to me as though we were old buddies. I was embarrassed to be the center of attention in a huge group of people, as I am in real life. At some point we all went across the street to sit around and watch a kid's soccer game. One of our actual neighbor's children was playing in it. But not Max.

Philip and I had to go get something so we left in a van. At some point I realized that no one was driving it and in a panic tried to climb over the back seat to get at the brakes and gas. So it was a stressful car dream. I managed to get control of the van but later on after some weirdness walking through a stranger's house deep in mourning Philip went to run an errand. He ended up crashing on his bicycle and couldn't walk.

Often times, the best part of my dreams, which are nearly always nightmares, is when I curl up in a ball and sleep or rest during which time the whole dream is permeated with static comfort, a kind of quiet state. Strangely enough I am usually curled up comfortably against complete strangers to my real life self but who I recognize from some other place and time. When I am forced to action in my dream there is almost always a point at which my dream self, with total dream awareness, wishes desperately to rewind the dream to the static place where I was in a non-state.

What I find most curious is that those moments in the midst of nightmares, those perfect moments of peace and calm and comfort are never something I experience in real life, and when it happens in dreams it feeds my corporeal self. It stays with me all day as though it was a real memory and I revisit it again and again until the realness of it begins to fade. Whatever stranger I happened to cozy up to is like a protective barrier against a scene of violence or anxiety, like a windbreak. I am not a cuddly person in real life. I can't sleep with an arm around me, it breaks into the sense of quiet I need in order to sleep. When sitting too still and too close to someone, even someone I love more than anyone else in the world like Philip, I become unnaturally aware of their breathing, their heartbeats, their warmth, their hair, their smell, and it is all too close and I feel suffocated and suppressed.

Which leads me to tell you something very personal: I cannot sleep facing anyone. I cannot sleep with some one's breath blowing against my face. Even if that breath was the sweetest smelling on earth. The sensation of warm breath against my face feels like a tribal drumbeat pounding in my ears preventing me from being aware of anything else.

Sometimes I wonder if death is nothing more than permanently joining our own subconscious existence. I wonder if our dreams are less like a playground for our subconscious and more like a parallel universe in which our subconscious actually exists. How is it possible to dream of a spacecraft moving through my body and have it feel so real that it wakes me up with liquefied insides, organs still being pushed aside as solid matter moves through my body? Awake and feeling exactly as I did in my dream is enough to make a person feel like they are going mad.

Although, as it turns out, I was going mad.

I would prefer that death be completely still. I would prefer that it is an unconscious state in which my matter is transformed into different matter without my being at all aware of the metamorphosis from corpse to fertilizer or ash. I don't want to be permanently retired to my nightmare world which is filled with all the horrors of this living world, only worse, because they never stop. They never die. The wars are never over. The homework is never finished. The bus is always gone before I get there.

Those brief moments of total safety that allow me to, at last, really sleep are rare and those guardians of my peace and comfort are fleeting beacons of light in a dark so morbid that I often carry it around with me for hours after waking; the bleak war torn landscapes, the bodies in bags, the guns, the dying, the screams, the sorrow that develops into a shroud so thick it's like being buried alive; it is hard to believe that such a well developed hell is just a figment of my imagination.

It does explain why I am never very still in real life. Except for when I settle down with beer and watch reruns of favorite movies and sitcoms until I am so tired I can no longer hold a beer in my hand anymore. Any other time in my waking life I am a restless spirit. Before I quit smoking cigarettes I would read and smoke and that would settle me down. But without the cigarettes the books don't quiet my body or my mind. I find myself unable to concentrate. I need to tranquilize my head into a forced quietude.

This past week we have cut our beer drinking in half and both of us are feeling relieved to be finally easing up on the beer. Physically we feel cleaner and better. But in the last week my dream life has become more vivid again, harder to shake. My sleep has not been as good. Drinking a lot of beer has a very soporific effect not just on my body but on my subconscious as well. My sleep is less conscious. I don't remember my dreams as much, I sleep more deeply.

The only other remedy for my peculiar problem is sleeping pills I suppose. Yet I would prefer not to take them. I wonder if there are any psyche meds out there that can medicate the sleeping self? It's as though my subconscious needs it's own therapist and it's own particular medications. Wouldn't that be funny if I called a therapist and asked to make an appointment for my subconscious? Hearing such a request, I am sure, would inspire any therapist to rush me in for a consultation.

Having the dream life that I have has made me feel like an outsider for much of my life. It's like constantly existing in two worlds and at the same time not completely living in either. When you've just been crawling across war torn border lines in a nightmare the previous night, covered in bodies where no clean sunlight ever shines and you're in a social situation during the day time where you're supposed to make small talk it's difficult to transition. It's like trying to have an amiable insipid conversation over the constant haranguing of machine gun fire, only the person you're talking to doesn't hear the other noise.

Which makes me sound completely crazy. I can't tell people I didn't actually hear their comment about how much fun eating celery is because I was busy trying to shut out the noise from my previous nightmare, because that is like lighting up a neon sign on my forehead that reads: "STRAIGHT-JACKET ME NOW".

Am I the only one who thinks old fashioned straight-jackets are kind of chic?



*For anyone who doesn't know it already, I have never had a license to drive a car. I have a motorcycle license to drive my Vespa, but I can't drive a car.